Customer: Global Internet Service Provider
A Case Study from Emerson Network Power
We spoke with one of our customers, a leading global Internet Service
Provider (ISP) about its business. As an ISP, its business is 24/7/365
and for its customers, 100% availability is the expectation. Therefore,
the data centers that support its business need to be as robust and
reliable as possible, with the ability for the data center team to rapidly
access, diagnose and repair any outage. To help achieve this model,
the company standardized on the Avocent® ACS Console Server
Platform for remote management. We asked the company to share
with us how it uses the platform and what benefits it gets on the
management of its multi-tenant data center structure.
This global Internet Service
Provider standardized on
Avocent® ACS Advanced Console
Server technology to increase
IT availability which is crucial
to business continuity and
reputation.
The Challenge
Many of this organization’s data center sites are not manned by IT professionals 24/7,
however these sites are required to be always up 24/7. Furthermore, these data
centers have many different IT infrastructure components to manage, for example
servers, storage systems, CISCO and Juniper switches and even tape libraries. This
requirement puts a large cost and human resource impact to a business which
operates in a highly cost-competitive market.
Solution
The organization decided to implement a remote management system which would
allow it to connect, diagnose and fix any data center from anywhere at any time, with
guaranteed connectivity, whether through out-of-band or in-band.
Standardizing on One Platform Means Simplicity
The company standardized on the Avocent® ACS Advanced Console Server Platform
for a number of key reasons.
Firstly, with such a heterogeneous environment, the concept of managing servers
through IPMI presents issues such as legacy systems with no IPMI functionality,
multiple IPMI platforms to become trained on, multiple password, login details and
user permissions to set to record and maintain for each user.
With server vendors coming and going, as with operating systems, updating is
necessary whereas standardizing with Avocent® ACS Advanced Console Server is
a one-time event. In fact, this customer attempted to move away from console
server management of its IT devices but it found that doing so is much more
complicated having to manage a wide array of devices and returned to console server
management.
The customer further claims that the Avocent® ACS Advanced Console Server is “the
best” to connect with CISCO and Juniper switches.
Remote Power Cycling of Servers
Another benefit to the customer of the Avocent® ACS Advanced
Console Server Platform is its ability to connect rack PDUs. Initially,
from a basic cost point of view, this saves the company on IP
addresses, but more importantly, this allows the user to switch ports
while managing the power via the power bars, switching servers or
other devices on/off remotely or to lock unused power ports in off
state to avoid unexpected power overload situations.
Customization and Reliability
With its LINUX shell scripting capability, the Avocent® ACS
Advanced Console Server enables the customer to greatly
accelerate the management of its connected IT devices by
automation of device configurations or using scripts for fault
analysis. And as for reliability and return on investment, the
customer has some appliances which are over 10 years old, still
working strong and never even requiring a reboot.
Summary
For customers with a largely heterogeneous environment where they
require remote management of multiple IT devices from multiple
vendors, including legacy systems, the Avocent® ACS Advanced
Console Server Platform offers some key advantages over traditional
methods:
• Guaranteed Access
• Reduced Administration
• Scripting
• An Early Detection Alert System
• Configurable Pinouts
• Cost Savings
Emerson Network Power
EmersonNetworkPower.com
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